Just off Harvard Square, we found an underground bookshop with a Russian poster in the window. I can't remember the name and I have lost the receipt. Inside the stacks were lined with piles of dusty books. This is where I bought The Gentleman From San Francisco & Other Stories by Ivan Bunin. That was two weeks ago.I had no free moments to crack the spine and read a little. School and other projects have kept me busy since I returned from Boston. I was reading Anton Chekhov's short stories first and writing (or grading) papers. But this weekend I finally found time to open the little red book and read the introduction.
Ivan Bunin was a friend of Anton Chekhov. The two became friends when Bunin wrote to the famous writer and asked his opinion on some drafts. In this way, Bunin became the last in a long tradition of Russian literature. His literary influences include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorky. What struck me most about the introduction (to the 1963 edition) is that the author, Thompson Bradley, makes an intricate study of Ivan Bunin's unique and innovative style.
Bunin was trained as a poet. His prose is laconic, concise to the point of mystery, and steeped in what Bradley calls a physical lyricism. The stories are object-based. Bunin possessed an almost "pagan" delight in the physical, especially as concerned with erotic love. Almost all of the emotions in his stories are invoked directly as a sensory experience. "In successive clauses he will experiment with various aspects of a color, for example, as if he were sharpening the focus on a projector lens, until he achieves the desired clarity and exactness."
The obsession for correct words reminds me of Michael Chabon, who has been called "a young American Nabokov." Mr. Nabokov would certainly have been aware of Ivan Bunin and the rest of the Russian literary traditions (Nabokov himself often translated classic works from the original Russian, such as Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). The physical lyricism, the focus on objects and their impacts, reminds me very much of Cormac McCarthy's later novels (No Country for Old Men and The Road in particular).
None of Mr. Bunin's stories are longer than a novella. The man himself died in exile in 1953. He lived in Paris and strongly apposed Lenin's 1918 revolution. Despite this, Bradley writes, Bunin is largely unpublished outside the former Soviet Republics. He was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, he has been "apparently doomed to oblivion in the West."
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